Tuesday, January 25, 2011

9,00,000 GB of Data in Single Gram of E Coli Bacteria

An amazing news of scientist world is B.I.O... S.T.O.R.A.G.E...

From the first Paper Tape which was used to store data on computer, scientists have evolved a numerous method to make data storage more efficient and fast.The future seems to have certain bacteria inside cpu’s to replace our harddisk drive to store binary data with greater data compaction.

The enthusiastic scientists of china from Chinese university of Hongkong (CUHK) are trying to use living cells of certain bacterias to construct more productive and eco friendly data storage devices. These CUHK is formed by a group of undergraduates and instructors from the chinese university of hongkong. The whole steps can be summarized as encoding data on the DNA’s of the bacteria and security is proved by encrypting through bringing in control environment of site specific genetic recombination. we can also call it as a ‘Bioencryption by recombination’.

Encoding is done using DNA bases like Adenosine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine to represent digits 0,1,2 and 3.If successfull implemented these can be a brand new biological cryptography system. The idea is simple, harnessing the incredible adaptability of simple organisms in the tortured enviroment to make sure that the message stored can be left undisturbed regardless of any enviromental changes.

The major advantage can be to make data extremely resistant to hacking and environmental damage,of which almost all current solutions are affected by.

Also these will improve data compaction efficiency ..

Till now scientists have successfully squeezed more than 9,31,322 GB of data on a single gram of e-coli bacteria through developing massively parallel bacterial data storage system.

Compared to 1 to 4 GB per gram data density of today’s conventional storage systems,9,00,000 gb per gram is an out-standing work.

Taking this dream more close to commercial reality ,has developed read/correction and random access modules , in addition to a encryption modules,all using site specific recombination of the
inversion type.

Days are not far when we might have these bacterias as our USB storage to replace pendrives ,flash cards etc….

However to retrieve encoded data back is still expensive,which requires a sequencer to decode.

Lets see what they have for us in future…

“A strong and secure biological data storage system or just as all other an unending dream…..”